Bicentennial
by Lady Isludis
Summary: Two hundred years is plenty of time, and yet no time at all.
1. The End

"I wish I could take it all back." Said Wheatley to no one in particular. "I honestly do. I honestly do wish I could take it all back. And not because I'm stranded in space…"

"I'm in space." His companion interjected.

"I know you are, mate!" Wheatley acknowledged with a hint of nervous laughter. He no longer had the energy to be annoyed. "Yup, we're both in space…"

"SPAAAAACE!" Cheered the other core.

"Anyway," Wheatley continued, "You know if I was ever to see her again… You what I'd say?"

"I'm in space."

It wasn't a guess, the 'space' core well and truly only cared about one thing, far too enraptured with the infinite cosmos to even give Wheatley the time of day.

"I'd say, 'I'm sorry.'" Said Wheatley, regardless. He didn't take it personally. "Sincerely. I am sorry I was bossy… And monstrous… And… I am genuinely sorry."

"I'm in space." The space core repeated, oblivious.

"The end."

There wasn't much else to be said after that. The two cores continued to drift for a long while, the space core chattering on about space and how happy he was just to be there, and Wheatley more or less alone with his thoughts.

Eventually, however, the space core fell silent.


	2. Goodbye

"Huh… You're awfully quiet all of a sudden." Wheatley observed. "Spacey?"

When he didn't receive a response, he swivelled around in his casing to investigate, only to discover that the space core had gone still. His optic, usually bright orange-yellow, was completely black.

"Hmm, could be in sleep mode…" Wheatley muttered. "Spacey? Oi, Spacey!"

The space core remained silent.

"Spacey…?" Wheatley repeated, the pitch of his voice raising slightly. "You're not…" He paused, optic wide, then shrugged it off. "No, no this is fine. You're fine, I'm fine. Everything is just fine! I mean, it's not like I haven't been wanting a break—no offence, no offense meant! It's just, you're… you can be just a tad… much? Sometimes…?"

Again, he received no reply. Not so much as a peep—not about space or anything else.

"Not that it's a bad thing," Wheatley backpedalled, "being interested in, you know, 'things'… It's just, you rarely if ever seem to talk about much else—anything else. 'Space' this, 'space' that… Sometimes I can't get a word in edgewise, ha ha!"

He paused unintentionally, as if to give the space core a chance to say something for himself.

"Is… is any of this getting through to you? Hm? A-any of it…?"

Another pause.

"Because if it is, I'd really appreciate if you could do something to… I mean you don't have to 'say' anything, no, just uh… s-show me that what I'm saying is at least rattling around in there? Give a sign…? A nod? A hint?" Long pause. "Anything…?"

Wheatley himself was quiet for a long while, not sure what had happened or how to react.

"I guess…" He finally got out, "you really are gone…" The admission sounded wrong, somehow, as if he'd spoken too soon. He was beginning to wish that were the case.


	3. If Things Were Different…

In the absence of someone to converse with (if you could even count the one-sided exchange between Wheatley and the space core as conversation), Wheatley wasn't quite sure what to do with himself.

Even Aperture—which had been teeming with other robots and personality constructs who all mostly kept to themselves—hadn't been this lonely. The space core, however much of a nuisance he had seemed, had served as a sort of buffer between Wheatley and, well, space.

…and this time, Wheatley didn't have a job to keep him occupied, completely at the mercy of his current trajectory.

"I suppose that was for the best." He admitted. "I mean, not the part where the entire facility almost exploded, but things sure would have been different if I'd gotten that job in manufacturing. Let someone else look after the smelly humans for a change! Then she could test all flippin' day if she wanted to, or not, but it's not like they'd be able to pin it on me. And that lady—"

He paused.

"Well, I really don't know what would have happened with her. Probably would've escaped, found herself another smelly human to run off with… Maybe one with a motorcycle… And some tattoos… One of those 'bad boy' types that are only after looks, dark hair, sunglasses, leather jacket, spends way too much time looking at himself in the mirror… A bad influence, really. Oh but then they'd get together, all 'partners in crime' like, and do who-knows-what together. Whatever it is that smelly humans do when they're not testing or destroying someone else's facility. Lock lips in the break room, I dunno…"

Amidst his monologuing, Wheatley took notice of a small round object—a planet.

"Huh. You would've gotten a kick out of this. Look, it's got its own moon and everything!"

Something about the blue orb made Wheatley want to stop and take it all in. Here was this colourful little speck, somehow suspended in an endless sea of black nothing—kind of like him, he supposed. As he stared, its split reflection in his optic grew larger and larger.


	4. Freefall

The planet had gradually transitioned from 'notable sphere on the left' to an unmissable wall; Wheatley could no longer see its horizons without physically turning in his casing.

"Wow, to think it was just a speck before." He mused. "Look at it now, it's bloody massive!"

By now, the two cores were close enough that the planet's sun had disappeared behind it. Clusters of lights sprinkled the ground far below. Those, too, grew steadily larger.

"Huh… It's getting a little warm. Do you feel—" Wheatley stopped himself. "Never mind."

That warmth, barely a prickle at first, became hotter and hotter. It sunk deeper and deeper—blistering, searing, scorching—eating through his shell…

All sorts of alerts that Wheatley had never seen before (but then, when would he have? This was his first atmospheric re-entry) shrieked at him in an unholy chorus, but there was nothing he could do. White-hot panic enveloped him—or was that the sparking ball of plasma?

The last thing he witnessed before being forcibly shut down was his lifeless companion, glowing red-hot…

…and then he rebooted.

His optic plates refused to open wider than an inch or two (enough to see out of, at least) but the rest of him felt stiff, possibly welded.

"Spacey?" He tried to call out, but his speech synthesizer was either fried to a crisp or missing entirely. A few other small (but not vital, thank goodness) pieces of hardware had apparently suffered a similar fate. His audio feed, however, seemed intact, if full of crackles and pops.

Being a sphere with no limbs, Wheatley had little power to move himself when things weren't stuck together. Now, he could do nothing but watch and wait for help to arrive, if it ever did, as clouds of dust blew across his field of vision.


	5. The Wasteland

Looking out at the inside of a crater (through an even more broken optic) proved to be about as eventful as drifting through a cosmic void, except what this planet lacked in chattering, space-obsessed white noise, it more than made up for in sand. Bazillions of tiny particles that all seemed to want to take up residence in Wheatley's casing, crunching, sticking, and just generally getting itself wedged in every little nook and cranny.

Suffice to say, Wheatley had sand in places he couldn't mention in polite company.

With time, more and more of the nasty stuff found its way into his crater (and by extension, into him, which he did not enjoy in the slightest), slowly erasing all evidence of an extraterrestrial encounter. The winds rose and died seemingly at random, but at their worst, they scraped Wheatley raw.

The crackling in his audio feed never went away, though it seemed to get worse with the weather, clipping in and out of existence and sometimes quitting altogether. Storms would blow by in silence while he fiddled around in hopes of getting his hearing back, or his voice, or maybe discovering a setting he could use to get himself out of this maddening predicament.

The sky lightened and darkened independent of all this, and sometimes, when it was clear, Wheatley got a glimpse of the celestial pool he'd been floating in not too long ago.

He couldn't tilt himself upward or open his sand-crusted optic plates further to get a better look, but he saw them all the same: bazillions of twinkling lights all staring back down at him from across the cosmos.

Aperture was gone.

Oh, it was still out there, probably, and She was probably still testing—unless the facility really _had_ exploded because of him—but then, the last thing She'd said to him was that she'd 'already fixed it'. Everything he'd broken, She'd somehow made right, all in the time it took to yank him from Her body.

 _I already fixed it, and you are NOT coming back._

Exile wasn't so bad, he told himself. Sure, his already limited mobility had been limited even further by the fall, and sure, maybe the constant sand-blaster to his _everything_ wasn't doing him any favours—but at least there were no incinerators or mashy spike plates for Her to toss him into.

Yes, Aperture was gone.

Along with it, everything that Wheatley had ever known.

Something rose up on the horizon, up, up over the edge of the crater where even Wheatley could see it: a great, ominous blanket that blotted out the stars and the sky itself, rumbling towards him.


	6. The Void

The storm loomed like a tidal wave: a monolith of sand that would've towered over the likes of even GLaDOS had she been present.

All tiny little Wheatley could do was watch helplessly through his stuck optic and brace himself for what was to come.

It hit him with indescribable force, screaming winds finally putting his audio feed out of its misery and forcing new sand into the few gaps that remained within his chassis. Still more was piling up and over him, as it had been since his landing, only now at a much faster rate.

Soon—within minutes—he would be buried completely.

 _Is this it…?_ He wondered. _Is this how I die…?_

Then, all of a sudden, the world turned off.

There'd been no warning, no fanfare, just ' _blip_ ' and everything was gone—desert and all.

Wheatley was dumbfounded.

The sand was gone, which in itself hardly seemed a bad thing, replaced by what he could only describe as a silent void.

Had he died…?

 _No_ , he told himself, _how can I still think if I'm dead? I'm still here, still alive, more or less… Well, my mind is still here, I'm not so sure about the rest…_

'MISSING INPUT', his console supplied.

Ah, so that was it, his optic had gone dead. _Vision, offline._ Not typically a good thing. He'd fiddle around a bit but his usual GUI wasn't running, and he wasn't exactly overly familiar with his console—yet another thing he'd been warned against messing with, or else he'd die.

It wasn't as if there'd been a whole lot to see, anyway.

Meanwhile, the storm raged on—or didn't—how should he know?

 _Well, that's just great! I'm stranded in the middle of nowhere on some god-forsaken planet, and now I'm broken! What am I supposed to do now?!_

The answer withheld itself, a punctuated silence that somehow screamed " _Nothing, that's what! You're just going to sit here and continue to think about what you've done, like always!"_

Or maybe that was the void itself, sending him on _another_ guilt trip. Brilliant! _Add that one to the pile!_ He could just hear _Her_ now…

 _Look at you, sitting there in the dirt like a piece of litter._ She'd probably say something like that. _Try and hack your way out of this one—oh! That's right, you can't, because you ARE a bloody hack!_

He tried to think of a good comeback—a real _zinger_ that would put _Her_ in her place—but who was he kidding? If there were a more compromising position than the one he found himself in right now, he didn't know it. He had _nothing._ No Aperture engineer or repair technician to fix him, no lady to carry him, and certainly no legs to carry himself…

…but his train of thought promptly derailed when he felt himself suddenly yanked upward.


End file.
